The Creative Writing MFA at Kingston University has been running now for several years. The two-year Fine Art programme was originally spearheaded by Scott Bradfield. We were very sorry to see Scott leave last year but relieved to learn that the mantle has been taken over by Paul Perry.

Paul Perry is the author and editor of a number of critically acclaimed books including The Drowning of the Saints, Goldsmith’s Ghost, The Orchid Keeper, and The Last Falcon and Small Ordinance, The Dedalus Press, 2010. Paul is also Curator for the largest and longest running international poetry festival in Ireland, dlr Poety Now.

This is going to be a great year for Paul not least because of the launch of his new book The Innocent Sleep. The novel, a psychological thriller, has been co-written with Dublin based author Karen Gillece. The Innocent Sleep was released on 18 February under the pen name Karen Perry. It has been commended by reviewers for its captivating and lyrical style of writing.

There is also a low residency MFA cohort led by Siobhan Campbell. It’s a distance learning option and attracts students from around the world. So this year we are a group of over twenty students, all at different junctions on the joyful, undulating, cross-country literary pathway. Over the coming months we hope to hear the sounds of these new voices and share some of our reflections along the way.

Georgia Fitch is an East London-born playwright. She began her career as an actress and started writing in order to create more interesting roles that represented the women she knew. Initially, Georgia partnered with Tracy O’Flaherty and they had their first major success with The Footballer’s Wife (1997). Georgia has since independently written numerous plays for the stage and radio as well as a television drama. She is most well-known for Adrenalin Heart (2002) which premiered at the Bush and then went on to be performed at the Tokyo Theatre Festival in 2004.

Georgia was Writer in Residence at the Bush Theatre, London, with O’Flaherty in 2001. In 2004, she was Writer in Residence at BBC Radio. From 2006 to 2008, she was on attachment to the Royal Court and Soho Theatre. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University.

Martin Daws is a performance poet and spoken word artist. He leads community and youth workshops across the country and regularly performs his work at events around the UK and Ireland. He was declared Farrago Slam Champ twice, was runner-up for both the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry in 2007and the Glastonbury Festival Slam in 2008. His 2008 debut at the Edinburgh Festival earned a five star review. He has been published in numerous international journals and is the author of Skin Tight the Sidewalk, a book/CD. He is Poet in Residence at Moelyci Environment Centre, North Wales. In April 2013 Martin Daws was announced by Literature Wales as The Young People’s Laureate for Wales. In this role Martin is working with young people all over Wales developing their engagement and enjoyment with spoken word poetry. Martin blogs at www.youngpeopleslaureate.org. Follow his twitter feeds @martindaws and @yplwales.

In the late 1980s Martin began DJ-ing in London and in 1994, after experiencing the New York slam scene, he combined his passion for music and language into performance poetry. His work still retains strong ties to music, running youth workshops on creative writing and rap, and collaborating with various musicians. Notably, he has worked with dancer Sarah Mumford on the WID performance ‘Don’t Step on the Cracks’. His experimental performances with electro-acoustic composer Rob Mackay have toured four continents.

Martin is a Writer-in-Residence with Kingston Writing School and on 19 March 2013, he taught a Teaching & Writing Workshop.

Barrie Keeffe is a London-born dramatist and screenwriter, best-known for his screenplay for the 1981 film The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. He began his career as an actor and journalist before turning to writing full-time in 1975. His first television play, Substitute, was produced in 1972 and his first theatre play, Only a Game, the following year. He was writer-in-residence at the Shaw Theatre in 1977, the next year, was resident playwright with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and associate writer with the Theatre Royal Stratford East from 1986 to 1991. His theatre plays have been produced in 25 countries. He has written stage plays, screenplays, radio plays, television scripts and novels.

Barrie’s accolades include The Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe Award for The Long Good Friday, Paris Critics Prix Revelation for Gotcha and the Giles Cooper Best Radio Plays Award for Heaven Scent. He was appointed a United Nations Ambassador for the 50th anniversary year in 1995 and, in 2010, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Warwick.

He has taught at City University London, the Skyros Writers Lab in Greece, the Collaldra Writers’ School and Retreat in Italy, Ruskin College Oxford and is a visiting fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He is currently a Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University where he teaches on both the Creative Writing MA and MFA, and supervises dissertations.

Barrie’s screenplay, The Long Good Friday, was on the MFA Critical Reading list and, on 19 March 2013, he taught a master class on film, stage and novel writing.

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Selected Bibliography:

Stage plays:

Only a Game (1973)

Gimme Shelter (1977)

A Mad World My Masters (1977, 1984)

Barbarians (1977)

Sus (1979)

Black Lear (1980)

Better Times (1985)

Not Fade Away (1990)

The Long Good Friday (1997)

Shadows on the Sun (2001)

Still Killing Time (2006)

Television:

Substitute (1972)

Not Quite Cricket (1977)

Champions (1978)

Waterloo Sunset (1979)

King (1984)

Screenplays:

The Long Good Friday (1981)

Sus (2010)

Novels:

Gadabout (1969)

No Excuses (1983)

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Barrie Keeffe’s Recommended Reading List:

Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey into Story – John Yorke

Adventures in the Screen Trade – William Goldman

A Whore’s Profession – David Mamet

Five Screenplays: The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, The Go-Between, Accident – Harold Pinter

Jonathan Barnes is the author of two novels, The Somnambulist (2007) and The Domino Men (2008), which have, between them, been translated into eight languages. A writer-in-residence at Kingston University, he contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review. He is also the author of a number of full-cast audio dramas including Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner and the forthcoming Doctor Who: Persuasion and The Ordeals of Sherlock Holmes.

Jonathan is a Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University. He taught a Critical Reading session on 13 November 2012 and a Teaching and Writing Workshop on 19 February 2013. Back in October of 2011 he gave NoDeadWhiteMen a reading list that you can read here, but we’ve made him do it again.

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Jonathan’s Recommended Reading

Some fiction:

At the Chime of a City Clock and Secondhand Daylight by D J Taylor – A pair of wonderful crime stories, set in the 1930s and inspired by the rackety life of the writer Julian MacLaren-Ross.

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest by Richard T Kelly – The finest piece of twenty-first century gothic fiction that I have read to date.

Blood and Water and other tales by Patrick McGrath – Superb, grisly short stories from another master of contemporary gothic.

The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan – Touching, exciting, ultimately profound – a story of survival after a disaster at sea.

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon – Perhaps the perfect campus comedy.

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen – Distinctive, fascinating and weird – a dark fruit of the fin de siècle

Some non-fiction:

Damn His Blood: Being a True and Detailed History of the Most Barbarous and Inhumane Murder at Oddingley and the Quick and Awful Retribution by Peter Moore – A work of popular history – and the most purely thrilling book that I’ve read in a long while.

The English Ghost by Peter Ackroyd – A collection of real (?) ghost stories from English history which possesses a strange cumulative power.

The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis – Amis is a divisive figure but this is fine, inspiring criticism, written in prose of a very high order.

Christopher Priest is an English writer of novels, short stories, biographies, critical works and more. He has written radio drama for BBC Radio 4, television programs for Thames TV and HTV and his reviews and features have been published in the Guardian, The Times, the Scotsman and other broadsheets and numerous magazines.

His 1995 novel, The Prestige, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and, in 2006, was made into a film of the same name starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johannson. Christopher Nolan directed and it was nominated for two Academy Awards.

Christopher has garnered several international awards, including the Eurocon Award (Yugoslavia), the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany), the Ditmar Award (Australia) and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France). In 2001, he was awarded France’s Prix Utopia for lifetime achievement. In 2002, he won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award for his novel The Separation. The Islanders won the 2011 BSFA Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The Adjacent will be released in June.

The MFA Residency Series is delighted to welcome back our first returning Resident, Paul Maliszewski. Paul was an MFA Resident in 2009 and is now a part of the 2013 MFA Residency Series as well. He is the author of Fakers, a book of essays, and Prayer and Parable, a collection of stories. His stories, criticism and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies, including Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Bomb, Bookforum and The Baffler. He is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes. He has also edited an issue of McSweeney’s (2002), Paper Placemats (2004), two issues of Denver Quarterly about real and imagined places (2004) and J&L Illustrated #3 (2012).

Paul earned his MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University and has taught at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University’s M.A. in Writing program. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their two sons.

Paul will be reading at 7:30pm on Tuesday, 16 April 2013 in JG 3003, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road. This is a free reading and open to the public.

Paul’s Suggested Reading List:

Here are some books that are either new-ish or new to me. Readers wanting more of a greatest-of-all-time selection can check out the list I sent for my first visit.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore [I reviewed this book and am including it here as a way of sneaking in a gentle reminder: Everyone should read Gaddis’s novel J R.]

Mawrdew Czgowchwz, by James McCourt [I’ve been thinking a lot about the semicolon lately. Apology, a new magazine, which I also recommend, asked me to moderate a discussion on the semicolon, to determine whether it’s an endangered species. I invited some writers, including James McCourt, to contribute short pieces about their use of (or disdain for) the semicolon. There are some beautifully deployed semicolons in Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous”) and wonderful writing throughout.]

Collected Body, by Valzhyna Mort [Excellent poems. Her first book, Factory of Tears, is super, too.]

His Wife Leaves Him, by Stephen Dixon [Out soon from Fantagraphics Books. I helped proofread the novel, which I considered an education in storytelling. Dixon is just so quick at starting and stopping his stories, and so artful without seeming the least bit artful. This book is Dixon’s masterpiece.]

An interview with Paul Maliszewski may be found here, on The Paris Review website.

The poet James Wagner recently asked a bunch of writers, “Why do you write?” I responded, or tried, anyway, and so did others.

James Miller is a London born author and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University. He read English at Oxford, earned an MA in Anglo-American literature at University College London and then completed his PhD in African-American Literature at King’s College London. Before joining Kingston University full time he taught A-level English at various colleges in London, American Literature at King’s College London and creative writing at South Bank University.

He has published two novels, Lost Boys (2008) and Sunshine State (2011). His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines, literary journals and anthologies. Recently, these have included: 3:AM Magazine, Beacons: Stories for our Not So Distant Future, Still: A Literary Art Book, and What Do You See When You Close Your Eyes? for a Jazz Band, The Moss Project.

On the 5th of March 2013 James ran the MFA Teaching & Writing Workshop.

James Miller’s list of recommended reading:

Discipline and Punish – Michel Foucault

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia – Deleuze and Guattari

Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – Frederic Jameson

Wendy Cope is an award-winning English poet renowned for her wit and humour. After reading History at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, she then spent many years teaching primary school in London, before making the switch to full time freelance writer in 1986. She has been a tutor on a number of Arvon courses and still occasionally runs workshops in academic settings and elsewhere.

Her first collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, introduced the world to her clear imagery and biting wit and became a bestseller. She has since published several more collections, which have all been enthusiastically received both by critics and the public. She has also edited a number of poetry anthologies including Is That the New Moon (1989) and The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (1998). Drawing on her experience as a primary school teacher, she has also written a narrative poem, The River Girl (1991) and two children’s books, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and Going for a Drive (2010).

In 1987 she won a Cholmondeley Award for poetry and in 1995 she was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. In 1998, BBC Radio 4 listeners voted her their choice to succeed Ted Hughes at Poet Laureate. If I Don’t Know (2001) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and in 2010 she was made an O.B.E. in the Queen’s Birthday honours. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Wendy Cope is part of the 2013 MFA Residency Series. She is also a writer in residence at Kingston Writing School. She regularly works with students and does readings. On 26 February 2013 she taught the MFA Writing and Teaching workshop talking about her experiences, strategies and motivations as a creative writing teacher and also modelling a poetry workshop.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry Collections:

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986)

Serious Concerns (1992)

If I Don’t Know (2001)

Family Values (2011)

Narrative Poem

The River Girl (1991)

Edited Anthologies

Is That the New Moon (1989)

The Orchard Book of Funny Poems (1993)

The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (1998)

The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (1999)

Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems (2001)

Books for Children

Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988)

Going for a Drive (2010)

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As with all our visiting writers, Wendy has kindly supplied a recommended reading list.

Some books I’ve enjoyed recently:

Poetry

Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds

The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie

Mountain Home: the Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China, translated by David Hinton

Lamar Herrin is an award winning author of numerous novelsand his short stories have appeared in various publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Epoch. His latest work is a memoir entitled, Romancing Spain. In 1985, he received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and, in 1991, he won of the Associated Writing Program’s Award for the Novel for The Lies Boys Tell. He is Professor Emeritus of creative writing and contemporary literature at Cornell University where he has taught for twenty-nine years. He and his wife, Amparo, divide their time between Ithaca, New York and Valencia, Spain. Find out more at his website.

He will be reading from his work on Tuesday, February 12, 2013 in the John Galsworthy Building Room 3003 from 7:30-9 pm. The reading will begin promptly at 7:30pm.